The First Time America Went Beard Crazy

A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of Now You See It, Now You Don’t. In the beginning, not a whisper of a whisker—not on Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or Monroe. In the early nineteenth century, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren change things up with fluffy muttonchops that drift like snow from ears to laugh lines. Otherwise, it’s a series of glabrous, faintly pink visages until you get to Abraham Lincoln. He adopted a beard after Grace Bedell, an eleven-year-old girl from Chautauqua County, New York, wrote him in October, 1860, urging him to let his whiskers grow: “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.” Lincoln wrote back, wondering if “people would call it a piece of silly affectation.” But he took Grace’s advice, and won the election.

Moving into the late nineteenth century, you notice a post-Lincoln efflorescence of beards. Rutherford B. Hayes rocks a glorious russet-and-gray fur bib. James Garfield sports a luxuriant, pewter-colored mustache-and-beard combo. Chester Arthur’s ruddy face is framed by lacy, drooping curtains. And then, in the early twentieth century, another abrupt shift back to clean-shaven faces. No President since has cultivated a beard in office; the last with any facial hair—a sportive handlebar mustache—was William Howard Taft, who left the White House in 1913. J. D. Vance is the first Vice-President since the nineteenth century to wear a beard while in office.

If you’re the sort who wonders about the cultural meaning of such things, you will find much to ponder and enjoy in the historian Sarah Gold McBride’s “Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America” (Harvard). Despite its whimsical title, “Whiskerology” is a serious academic book with many points to make about race and gender and their entanglement with coiffure in the United States. But McBride doesn’t shy from delightful anecdotes for those who like to magpie through history’s weirdnesses alongside its grave themes.

Consider Joseph Palmer, a Massachusetts farmer who, in the eighteen-forties, flouted convention by befriending transcendentalists and joining a short-lived agrarian commune. But, in 1830, what scandalized Palmer’s fellow-Americans was his beard. After he moved from his farm to the town of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, locals hurled rocks at him, called him an “old Jew,” and, when he refused to submit to a forcible shaving, threw him in jail. By the time he died, in 1875, whiskers were everywhere. But Palmer, or his survivors, had not forgotten his ordeal: his tombstone bore the inscription “Persecuted for wearing the beard.”

This isn’t the only tale of a hair-borne insult carried to the grave. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Butler, a Revolutionary War veteran, was twice court-martialled for refusing to cut his long tresses. They were, he said, “the gift of nature and an appendage to my person.” Before dying, of yellow fever, Butler instructed friends to “bore a hole through the bottom of my coffin right under my head and let my queue”—his ponytail—“hang through it.” Butler was too peculiarly a man of his time to pass as a proto-hippie. Still, I’m put in mind of David Crosby in 1970, singing about resisting pressure to cut his hair and instead letting his “freak flag fly.” And of my brothers coming of age in L.A. in the seventies, all facing taunts for their long hair. (“Are you a girl or a boy?”—and other, more overtly homophobic insults.) Or of my nephew at Catholic school in the nineties, having his curls measured for height, not length, by a ruler placed atop his head. Why did people care? Who were these boys hurting with their lovely locks? But I digress.

McBride traces hair’s cultural meaning through history. In medieval Europe through to the eighteenth century, people saw it as separate from the body—a substance extruded like, regrettably, excrement. By the eighteenth century, this theory was replaced by a view of hair as an ornament that signalled both aesthetics and social position. (“An English Puritan man who wore his hair long,” McBride writes, “communicated to his fellow Puritans that his adherence to his faith had lapsed.”) In the nineteenth century, the period that McBride focusses on, hair was framed as an intrinsic biological feature that revealed fundamental truths. Even a single strand could supposedly expose someone’s race or criminality. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who proved influential in the U.S., claimed criminals had “thick hair” and “thin beards,” with black hair prevailing over blond. Meanwhile, hair care and styling became more of a form of self-expression, McBride says, however much that might be subject to cultural standards, fashion trends, and gender norms. (Somehow, the women of Trump world all know to wear their hair in cascading waves, just as they seem to know what the Mar-a-Lago face demands from fillers and Botox.)

As with many sweeping arguments, the fascination lies in the details. In colonial North America, men favored extravagant European aristocratic styles: fleecy, powdered periwigs with pigtails; high, peaked wigs bottom-heavy with crimped locks; long, rippling natural hair. Both African and European men wore wigs or grew their hair long. For an enslaved man, donning a silvery-white wig might be a way to claim social status or, perhaps, to parody his enslavers’ beloved hairdos.

In the late eighteenth century, McBride writes, “long hair worn in public spaces could even strengthen a masculine gender presentation.” One example is the popular itinerant preacher known as the Public Universal Friend. Born Jemima Wilkinson in 1752 into a Rhode Island Quaker family, the Friend, after a severe illness, abandoned their birth name, claiming God had endowed them with an androgynous spirit. A contemporary journal described the Friend as “neither man nor woman.” When directly asked their gender, they replied simply, “I am that I am.” Yet in public they presented “explicitly and deliberately as masculine,” with followers referring to the Friend with male pronouns. This masculine exterior included dark clerical robes, a cravat, and, notably, a hair style of ringlets, “long and loose,” rather than covered by a cap, as was typical for women. Remarkably, such gender ambiguity did nothing to deter believers—the Friend attracted acolytes throughout New England.

Long hair and wigs on men fell from fashion in the early nineteenth century. Even in colonial times, Puritan leaders had condemned such styles, invoking St. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians: “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.” Men’s hair that “savo’s of effeminacy,” the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth preached in 1669, “is unlawfull.” (Are you a girl or a boy?) For the Reverend Nicholas Noyes, wigs represented an alarming “transmutation of the visible tokens and distinctions of sex.” Noyes was particularly affronted, McBride notes, by the fact that wig hair frequently came from women’s heads. (High-quality wigs used human hair, whereas cheaper ones employed horsehair or wool.) “Women’s hair when on their heads, is a token of Subjection,” Noyes declared. How, he demanded, could it cease to be so “when Men wear it?”

The Puritans’ contention was strengthened by the fact that Indigenous men typically wore their hair long—a practice white missionaries were determined to eliminate. As late as 1901, William A. Jones, the Commissioner for Indian Affairs, instructed agents to “induce your male Indians to cut their hair.” Like face painting, long hair wasn’t “in keeping with the advancement they are making, or will soon be expected to make, in civilization.” Jones recommended starting with tact, then withholding rations and jobs from the noncompliant. But McBride argues that, by this point, Americans had begun viewing hair style as a personal choice, making Jones’s ultimatums controversial. Some agents refused to implement them, fearing Indigenous uprisings, and newspapers denounced his coercive tactics. Though Indian boarding schools still forcibly sheared children’s hair, Jones’s orders for adult men proved too noxious to enforce.

It took a while, but the Puritan view that linked femininity to long hair eventually prevailed. Wigs lost popularity partly owing to their association with English aristocracy. By the nineteenth century, long hair on men, too, faced cultural disdain: it demanded care that industrious citizens of the young Republic supposedly lacked the time for. Let privileged women endure laborious beauty rituals—men fussing over ringlets undermined what McBride calls the American ideal of masculine “self-mastery.” The Supreme Court Justice John Jay, in a letter to John Adams, lamented arriving late to an appointment because he’d been getting his hair done—“ridiculous fashion makes us dependent on valets and the Lord knows who.” The resentment spread. In 1796, one critic argued that wigs encumbered the “open, manly, independent foreheads, which have freely sweat for the toil of freedom.”

This wasn’t an easy sell. The Founding Fathers loved their wigs. Washington’s famous Gilbert Stuart portrait shows his white hair styled to look wiglike, McBride says. She cites Virginia wigmaker records showing that Jefferson purchased multiple wigs, queues, and three pounds of hair powder in the seventeen-sixties and seventies. Long-haired holdouts persisted well into the nineteenth century—Indigenous men, Chinese immigrants (often harassed for their queues), and white men like Butler, who was as devoted to his mane as any glam-metal rocker.

You might think the beard boom made up for hair’s retreat from the head. Maybe it did, in part. But McBride gives other reasons why, after a century of clean-shavenness, nineteenth-century men embraced whiskers. Beards emerged as legible emblems of male virility and authority just as women began demanding the vote. The beard vogue of the late nineteenth century, McBride notes, was unusual in that it inspired celebratory writing about the whiskers themselves. Pro-beard propaganda included the daft theory, floated by the widely published slavery apologist and physician John Van Evrie, that the “Caucasian is really the only bearded race, and this is the most striking mark of its supremacy.” (Frederick Douglass, splendidly bearded, remarked that Van Evrie must have grown “weary of his unprofitable twaddle about the negro’s brain” to resort to “disquisitions upon the beard.”) It’s no coincidence, McBride argues, that the bearded lady became a sideshow staple during this era of male whiskers and women’s-rights activism. The “enfreakment” of women with facial hair, she suggests, helped reinforce the idea that beards—and power—belonged to men. That might be a stretch. Did men really need beards to remind anyone that they were in charge? Still, McBride finds support in the anti-suffragist Horace Bushnell, who likened women voting to women growing beards, both being a “radical revolt against nature.”

One explanation for the rise of beards that deserves more attention is practical: avoiding dangerous razors. Before safety razors, shaving meant wielding a lethal blade against your throat—or trusting someone else to do it. Straight razors required skill to use without bloodshed. Henry David Thoreau’s brother died after nicking his finger on a rusty razor and developing tetanus—and such mishaps were likely not uncommon. Barbershops carried their own risks. In antebellum America, many were owned and staffed by African American men and patronized by whites; as the historian Sean Trainor notes, “Barbers ranked among the richest and most powerful members of the free Black community.” Over time, whites grew increasingly uneasy about submitting to Black barbers wielding sharp instruments. German immigrants gradually took over the trade, Trainor explains, initially serving “a growing population of working-class customers”—men “too poor, and in many cases too resentful of Black barbers’ success,” to frequent the best Black-owned shops. Meanwhile, a beard provided a simpler solution: a luxuriant facial covering requiring only the occasional scissor trim—no barber necessary.

There are some historical peculiarities that even patient scholarship cannot fully explain. Nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans collected locks of hair from the living and the dead alike, fetishizing these keepsakes. McBride focusses on one motivation: the learned hope that a taxonomy of hair would reveal identity. This pseudoscience promised to resolve racial ambiguity—as in courtrooms where skin color proved insufficient for racial determination. (McBride cites Alexina Morrison, who, in the eighteen-fifties, escaped slavery in Louisiana with the claim that she was white and had been kidnapped by her enslaver. In the last two of three trials, Morrison’s lawyers presented evidence about her hair texture and color. Both of these juries found in her favor.)

Peter Arrell Browne, a Philadelphia lawyer, dubbed his hair science “trichology”; Dennis Corcoran, a New Orleans journalist with perhaps more humor, proposed “whiskerology.” These schemes produced hair collections that survive today, no doubt bewildering (and possibly repulsing) generations of archivists. Browne left twelve volumes of animal and human hair at Drexel’s Academy of Natural Sciences, many from famous people, including Presidents. Harvard’s Peabody Museum houses hundreds of Indigenous hair clippings that an anthropologist diligently collected.

McBride is less interested in exploring another motivation for saving locks of hair: the particular sentimentalism that made people cherish the hair of loved ones, especially those who had died, or of honored forebears. Hair rested in scrapbooks or lockets, or was woven into Victorian jewelry. Today, as McBride notes, few of us see hair snippets as sweet emblems, as synecdoches for lost bodies or souls. We might save a lock from a child’s first haircut, as we might save a baby tooth, but even those—if you have ever come across such an object in the back of a dusty drawer, you may agree with me—have a slightly creepy, relic-like quality. The collecting of hair is, in short, a deeply unrelatable manifestation of deeply relatable emotions: love, grief, nostalgia, yearning. At least two nineteenth-century poems by English Romantics—one by John Keats, one by Leigh Hunt—express rapture at seeing a preserved lock of John Milton’s hair. “There seems a love in hair, though it be dead,” Hunt’s poem reads, in part. “It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread / Of our frail plant,—a blossom from the tree / Surviving the proud trunk;—as though it said / Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me / Behold affectionate eternity.” The mystery endures. ♦